We have (fucking finally) reached the end of the Yaoi Press pile, and I purposely saved the best for last – so if Yaoi Press titles are too offensive to your eyesight to finish more than one review, make it this one. And if you’ve read them all so far and are ready to tap out due to early onset degenerative eyesight damage , it’s too late to turn back now, my friend. We’re nearing the summit and that last avalanche blocked our descent path. Plus, do you have any idea how many Yaoi Press titles there are?! There’s like 60 of them, think how merciful I am! This isn’t Everest, this is a bunny slope! Don’t you want to see what’s at the top of the mounta…errr…large snowy hill? There’s a lot going on up there but just from this low vantage point, I can see we’ve got dudes getting fucked with corn, tentacle kemonomimi rape, and a trap porn parody of Goldilocks and Three Bears. Woo-wee! Tighten up your boots and let’s get a move on. Those people above us on the ski lift are just pussies . Oh, look, there’s a sign:
Warning: Very NSFW images after the jump.
Happy Yaoi Yum Yum is a very…..memorable BL. Whether if it’s for the right reasons, wrong reasons, or something in between, I am not sure. Actually, I don’t even know what response they were hoping for with this. Shock? Disgust? Laughter? All three? Either way, if you like weird yaoi, you don’t want to miss this one. Plus, buying it comes with the built-in bonus of being able to pass it down to your grandkids.
We’ve got four stories in here plus a mini art gallery. The first and easily the book’s highlight is a BL parody of Jack and the Beanstalk which approaches a level of outrageousness that I haven’t seen since Incredible Kintaro, and that isn’t a compliment that I give out lightly. Perhaps inspired by the famous corn meme from a certain 90s yaoi that floating around late-night anime con panels even to this day, this is peak OEL BL in the “has an ISBN” category and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Part fever dream, part tentacle rape orgy, and part Attack on Titan, whoever was involved in bringing this to life surely has an imagination, for better or for worse. It’s so silly, so vulgar, and so ridiculous, that I have trouble believing the intent was to turn people on. Probably it was more like “how far can go with this idea in 30 pages?” and this was the result. Bravo? Whatever your thoughts, just remember this – this story was printed in an actual real physical book that you can buy with a registered ISBN, that I am holding in my hand. If you’ve ever tried to get your own art published in print somewhere and got rejected, just let that sink in.
After this we have something I haven’t seen in a YP book before, it’s an art compilation from six artists they call a ‘Gallery of Hard Yaoi,’ and it’s something that somewhat makes sense for YP to have. Not all BL artists are involved in the comic tradition, especially outside of Japan, and many simply create one-off digital drawings to post online. For many of the artists that YP has approached, I am guessing that they found them because they make BL art, not BL comics in particular, and they possibly never had before (actually judging by some of the stuff YP has put out, I’m guessing that’s definitely the case). So when YP goes ‘hey do you want to write/draw us a BL comic? You know, like yaoi manga?’ not all of these artists were in comfortable territory and were perhaps not doing the type of work they are known for or are even particularly good at. Instead some probably went, ‘I’ve never done a comic before and it will probably suck, can I just draw you some regular BL art instead?’ By this time, YP probably had enough of those answers to put together a ‘gallery’ like this, and that’s probably how this came to be.
Most of the art in here is what would been considered “good” on deviantart in the 00s (in other words, mediocre), but there’s a few that are at least as good as what you find in most doujins, and a couple that are fairly WTF but not really in a good way. I’m not sure if they were created specifically this release or not, because a lot of them look like they were originally in color.
Next up we have everyone’s favorite sentient, trash-talking tentacle rapist – drumroll – Trach the Tentacle Monster! You will be familiar with him if you have read Yaoi Hentai, either my review or any of the books themselves, but if not, he is exactly what he sounds like – and, imho, the best original thing to come out of Yaoi Press. He’s a walking self-aware joke about the tentacle rape trope, and the humor about the scenarios he finds himself in is usually on-point. This wasn’t my favorite Trach story I’ve read, but it’s the longest and has the most sex, so if you’re into kemonomimi tentacle rape, Trach got ya fam. Ever want to see a mermaid get jerked off by a tentacle monster too? Ask and Trach will answer.
After this we have a second fairytale parody, this time of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, featuring a trap ‘Goldicocks’ and three dudes with fuzzy ear headbands. YP likes fairytale parodies and this is one of the better ones they’ve done, if for no other reason other than there’s a lot of detailed dicks and the anatomy isn’t atrocious.
This has been mentioned in other reviews of Yaoi Press titles but comedy (in particular parody comedy) is really where YP hits their stride. One reason is that in many of their releases the art is so bad it’s comedic anyway and is hard to take seriously, but the main reason is that much of their catalog is just parroting Japanese manga and it comes off as cringey. When they stop trying to do this and there isn’t general insecurity about not being ‘real’ manga permeating every page, their work is much better. The only way western BL makes sense is when they’re doing something original, something that Japanese manga does not offer. It seems they began to see this in the Yaoi Hentai anthologies (of which this is a spiritual successor) where by the end they began to feature artists with a much wider range of art styles besides the ‘manga look.’ The only shame is that they never opted to go full-color, which would have been easy because probably most of these OEL artists usually drew in full-color anyway. It definitely seems like they desaturated original color art for some of their releases.
The last story is called:
…and it’s written by Yamila Abraham herself. She is Yaoi Press’s founder (in other words, she figured out how to write off her BL hobby off as a business expense, which is fairly admirable any way you look at the results), and her stories are usually better than what you’d expect. They’re self-aware and funny when they try to be (she also writes all the Trach ones) though I have mostly liked her non-comedy story ideas too. Unfortunately they often have awkward art paired with them which waters them down, and this one of those. This one is about a porn star who insists that getting pegged on set doesn’t make him gay, except then he actually falls for a dude so I guess he sure stuck it to the man. Stuck it in the man? The man stuck it in him?
It seems more like filler than anything, but then again it’s tough to outshine the crazy BL beanstalk story in here as well as immediately follow a Trach story, so maybe it was just unlucky placing.
Anyway – by Yaoi Press standards, Happy Yaoi Yum Yum is great. I never thought I would have “Yaoi Press” and “great” in the same sentence, but they earned it with this one. Whether this was a lucky guess at the right combination, they deliberately sat down and thought, ‘wait, no one will take us seriously anyway, so let’s just not be serious,’ or the Angel of Yaoi appeared to them in a dream with a revelation of what must be done, I’m not sure. But whatever happened, it worked, and it was about time. I’m pretty confident this is one of their best if not the best release they ever did (I’m sure as hell not gonna read all 60 to find out though, so if you like their work and have a rec, drop it in the comments) and it nearly makes up for some of the insufferable crap I had to wade through to arrive here. Ok – I’m officially ready to ski down this slope now that I’ve been climbing for what feels like months and bury myself is some horny webtoons for the next week, I don’t even want to look at a printed book for a while. Wheee! That’s true by the way, but the actual reason for it is that is that I am going to both read and review a long BL series soon so I’ll have my fair share of books in my lap next month. It’s an interesting one so I hope you’ll check out the review! See you next time!
TL;DR This shit is wild. It took them a while and a lot of duds, but Yaoi Press has finally given us a hit album, with all killer and no filler. This book has all the good parts of YP books and everything they do well (outrageous and trashy, no censoring, PWP, tons of dicks, comedy stories/parodies, racially diverse characters, Trach the tentacle monster) and they finally eliminated all of the shit (Studio Kosen terrible art, plots that are either too serious or trying too hard to be Japanese manga, ads and filler jammed between stories). This type of book definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like trashy yaoi comedy then you will be in for both a very fun and a very memorable ride. I’m not really sure if it was the result of them trying harder or simply trying way less, it’s honestly kind of hard to tell, but whatever they did they found the formula. This title is pretty rare now because its reputation precedes it – but if you get one YP title, make it this one.